SEO 101: The Essential SEO FAQ for Bloggers

Who doesn’t want to dominate Google? We all love first page rankings, right?

But there’s one thing about dominating Google search results: SEO.

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is almost a rocket science for most bloggers. The good thing is, you don’t have to be an expert at SEO to be able to generate first page rankings to your site.

Just learn and implement “few” most important SEO techniques and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors in search results. If you’re looking to improve your search traffic, here are a few of the best SEO practices you can implement in 2019.

5 Best SEO Practices for Bloggers To Dominate Google

1. Perform in-depth keyword research

If you don’t understand keyword research, you’re missing out on huge amount of traffic and sales from search engines.

Keyword research is all about finding “low competitive yet profitable keywords” so that you can create highly informative content (by keeping your target keywords in mind) to your audience.

Here’s the key to successful keyword research: “find low competitive keywords”.

It doesn’t matter what niche you are in, if you’re going after high competitive keywords, you’re not going to get any traffic from search (especially if you’ve a new website). So the key here is to find long tail keywords which have less monthly searches.

Quick note: Always have access to SEO tools like SEMrush if you want to find highly profitable yet low competitive keywords.

If you’ve a fairly new blog or website, I highly recommend you to go for those keywords which have less than 500 monthly searches. Why?

Low competitive keywords are easier to rank for. You can get first page rankings by creating informative content (you’ll get great results even without building too many backlinks).

That being said, here are a few helpful keyword research tools you can use in 2019.

• Ubersuggest
• SEMrush
• Keywordtool.io

While doing keyword research, target long tail keywords.

Long tail keywords usually contain 4 or more keywords and they are easier to rank in Google search.

For instance, you can get better rankings for long tail keyword phrases like “best fitness apps for Yoga teachers” instead of targeting short tail keywords like “best fitness apps”.

So that’s how you can perform long tail keyword research to dominate Google search in 2019 and beyond.

2. Content creation and optimization is essential

Content is really the king. No matter what niche you are in, if your content is mediocre, it will not perform well in the search engines. That said, here are few incredible tips to create exceptional content that performs well in search engines.

Understand your target audience: This is the first step to creating great content. The better you understand your audience, the easier it is for you to create “high converting content”. Make sure to find their wants and needs. Make a list of all the questions they might have by browsing through platforms like Quora or taking surveys.

Create in-depth content: If you want to dominate Google search results with your content, make it extremely detailed. According to many researches, it’s proven that in-depth content (which contains over 2000 words) performs really well in search results.

In fact, we’ve been creating long form of articles for more than 4 years now at Bloggers Passion and the results are amazing both in terms of search traffic and sales.

Use platforms like Quora: Q & A platforms like Quora help you find out what your target audience truly wants. You can follow all the topics that you blog about, find all the questions and start creating content around the topics that you’re interested in.

Last but not least, properly optimize your content for search engines which we’re going to discuss now.

When it comes to content optimization, the following factors play a crucial role.

• Page title
• Meta description
• URL
• Heading tags (h1, h2, h3, h4, etc.)
• Image optimization
• Internal links

If you’re using WordPress, I recommend you to check out the following 2 plugins (both are great) for content optimization.

WordPress SEO by Yoast: This is the most downloaded SEO plugin in WordPress history with over 20 million downloads worldwide. It helps you easily optimize all your contents (including posts and pages) for your primary keywords. From page titles to meta description to image optimization, you can do everything using this plugin.

SEO By Rank Math: This plugin is getting a lot of positive buzz and it’s considered as the best alternative to SEO by Yoast. In fact, it offers all the premium features of plugins like Yoast where you can optimize your posts for 5 focus keywords per post. Not only that, it also lets you track your keyword positions in Google and offers a wide range of other helpful features to optimize your contents like a pro.

3. Make sure your website ticks all the boxes

Here are few things that your website must have for better performance in search.

• SSL integration
• Mobile-friendly design
• Faster website loading times

Now, let’s talk about the above most important things to make your website great for both search engines and users.

SSL integration: Google considers https as a ranking signal, which means, Google is giving weightage to websites on https version. To get https version, you need SSL integration. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer which makes your site go from http to https and it’s a secured protocol which is used to establish a secure connection between server and client.

If you’re using hosts like Bluehost, WPX hosting etc, you’ll get SSL integration at free of cost (all you need to do is to turn on SSL to make your site https). Otherwise, you can free SSL integrations from sites like Cloudflare.

Super fast page loading times: If your site takes more than 3 to 4 seconds to load, your website visitors will most probably abandon your site. Your website speed is so much important not only for your users but also for improving your search rankings.

Did you know that Google takes page loading times into consideration while ranking web pages? Yes, that’s true. Here are few quick tips to have a faster loading website.

• Move to a faster web host (at Bloggers Passion, we’re using WPX hosting and it’s really faster when compared to any other web hosting companies)
• Use less plugins
• Optimize your image size before you even upload them on to your dashboard
• Leverage browser caching
• Enable GZip compression (Gzip is a file format that essentially locates strings of similar code in your text files and then temporarily replaces them to make the files smaller which helps in faster loading times)
• Minimize your redirects

Mobile responsive design: Is your blog mobile-friendly? If not, you’re missing a lot of traffic and sales on the table which can be beneficial to your competitors. So why leave your traffic and sales to them?

If you’re on WordPress, you can simply install a plugin like WP Touch or buy a premium responsive WordPress theme. Problem solved!

4. Research your competitors

If you see your competition as an opportunity, you’ll thrive online but if you see it as a threat, you’ll fail in the long run.

Do you know who your competitors are? Do you know who you are competing against? By knowing and carefully analysing your competition, you can learn so much.

Here are a few things to analyse while researching your competitors.

• Find out their top performing blog posts (which are bringing them the most traffic)
• Find out their top “income generating” pages (so you’ll have a better idea about what type of products to promote)
• Analyse your competitors website traffic (along with their traffic sources)
• Research your competitors backlink sources (so you can find link building opportunities to improve your own site’s backlink profile)

In a nutshell, the fastest way to your website’s success is to make a list of 10 to 15 competitors, find all their top performing pages along with their backlink sources and try to get links from those sites using various link building strategies.

5. Link building is the key

It doesn’t matter how great your content is, if it’s not attracting any links or you’re not building back link to your content, it’s not going to rank in the first page.

The sooner you realise the importance of link building, the faster you’ll start generating better results from SEO. It’s as simple as that. That being said, there are various ways to build quality backlinks to your site but the following strategies work like a charm in every industry.

• Roundup links
• Guest posting
• Build relationships

Let’s briefly talk about each one of them now.

Guest posting: Guest posting is the evergreen strategy to build links from relevant blogs in your industry. You don’t always have to aim for authority sites for guest posting as publishing and high quality, relevant and small blogs can also work like a charm.

Just make sure to write high quality guest posts so you can improve your authority as a blogger apart from getting relevant links to your site.

Roundups links: One of the easiest ways to build quality and highly relevant links to your site is to find and participate in roundup posts. There are a ton of bloggers (especially new bloggers) from all kinds of niches publish roundups on a regular basis.

You just need to be active on social media or use search strings on Google like “expert roundups + [your topic]” to find such sites. Make friends with them by sharing their stuff, commenting on their posts. That’s how you can get into their radar to start participating in their roundup posts.

Link building by building relationships: Networking and building relationships with other bloggers is often the most underrated strategy to build links. Make sure to focus on helping people instead of solely focusing on getting links and that’s the secret to successful networking.

We’re currently building a Facebook group where we share mostly blogging and SEO related stuff. The whole purpose of the group is to help beginners to build a money making blog and to connect with other bloggers in our industry. The best part is that, there are so many bloggers who interviewed me (by linking to my posts) and they mostly came from the Facebook group.

That’s the power of networking. So go and start networking with other bloggers using email, blogs and social media sites.Final thoughts on the best SEO practices to use in 2019

Practicing the best SEO strategies is the key to long term SEO success. Don’t look for shortcuts as increasing your organic traffic takes time.

Focus on learning and implementing just 2 to 3 evergreen SEO best practices and you’ll be way ahead of your competitors. Just be consistent and regularly create content that adds value to your target audience.

Let me know if you’ve any questions in the comments.